I really think you lot need to be a bit clearer about what the emotional content of your atheism is. You are the ones who claim to be acting on a mere lack, on a non-belief, but as absences go, contemporary atheism doesn’t half seem to involve some strong feelings. It isn’t all reading Lucretius, or thinking about the many forms most beautiful. For many of you, the point of atheism appears to be not the non-relationship with God but a live and hostile relationship with believers. It isn’t enough that you yourselves don’t believe: atheism permits a delicious self-righteous anger at those who do. The very existence of religion seems to be an affront, a liberty being taken, a scab you can’t help picking. People who don’t like stamp-collecting don’t have a special magazine called The Anti-Philatelist. But you do. You do the equivalent of hanging about in front of Stanley Gibbons to orate about the detestability of phosphor bands and perforations. The Belief section of the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site – where you’d think that it wouldn’t be that surprising to find discussion of, you know, belief – is inhabited almost entirely by commenters waiting for someone to have the temerity to express a religious sentiment, whereupon they can be sprayed with scorn at fire-extinguisher pressure. It’s as if there is some transgressive little ripple of satisfaction which can only be obtained by uttering the words “sky fairy” or “zombie rabbi” where a real live Christian might hear them.

Jerry Coyne asks if we think this is accurate. I do, yeah. I’ve said recently, and will repeat here, that you see all the exact same group dynamics at play in a comment thread full of atheists as you do anywhere else on the Internet. A bunch of assholes, full of self-righteousness, snarking at their enemies and patting each other on the back for being so clever. It only seems different when you’re emotionally invested in it. Having the crest of Reason & Rationality emblazoned on your flag doesn’t change the fact that you are, well, just another group of people rallying around a flag and behaving accordingly.

It will be pointed out, rightly, that religion is hardly a quiet, private hobby like stamp collecting, and as such, it’s to be expected that people will have strong, normative opinions about it. And no doubt, people who act like assholes during religious arguments will tell themselves and others that the importance of the cause compels them to forego politeness. But though it may be a common conceit to believe otherwise, most of what people do on the Internet is not valuable. You’re not changing the world by commenting on blogs; you’re just hanging out with your friends. Your sarcastic jokes and remarks aren’t cumulatively adding up to progressive social change; you’re just showing off to win praise from the rest of the group. Pointing and denouncing might feel satisfying, but they’re not the same thing as activism. You’re just one more insignificant individual who takes pleasure from feeling justified in being mean and causing pain to someone from the out-group, especially if it raises your own status.

The striving for distinction keeps a constant eye on the next man and wants to know what his feelings are, but the empathy which this drive requires for its gratification is far from being harmless or sympathetic or kind. We want, rather, to perceive or divine how the next man outwardly or inwardly suffers from us, how he loses control over himself and surrenders to the impressions our hand or merely the sight of us makes upon him; and even when he who strives after distinction makes and wants to make a joyful, elevating or cheering impression, he nonetheless enjoys this success not inasmuch as he has given joy to the next man or elevated him or cheered him, but inasmuch as he has impressed himself on the soul of the other, changed its shape and ruled over it at his own sweet will.

— Nietzsche

In other words, it can make us feel powerful to be even a little mean. The need to feel powerful is so ingrained in us that even professions of humility can become subtle means of self-promotion (“I’m less interested in one-upsmanship than you are”, as Alan Watts said). And even those of us who genuinely want to spread joy and benevolence get an ego-charge out of exerting a powerful effect on another person, on winning their admiration, on inspiring awe (or even a little fear), on mattering in an undeniable way. Most of what we do on blogs is a way of convincing ourselves and others that we matter, of elevating ourselves, and a quick and easy way to get that assurance is to knock someone else down.

Yes, yes, I know, of course they deserve it. You just might want to take note of the fact that almost everyone who acts hatefully or aggressively toward another claims that they’re only doing it for a higher cause, or in order to defend themselves or someone weaker. It seems to be a deeper truth about human psychology, no matter what the intellectual rationalizations—it doesn’t take much to get people to choose sides and start throwing rocks and making raids on the enemy’s territory. The hats and armbands and fight songs may change, but from a slightly removed vantage point, all of human history has been nothing but an increasingly sophisticated story of rock-throwing and territory-raiding. And no, I don’t believe that being an atheist means that we are somehow more aware of our subconscious, preverbal instincts and thus better able to keep them from taking us over—if anything, the smug satisfaction we take in our special status makes us complacent against them. Nor do I believe that those lizard brain urges, like the fabled dictatorship of the proletariat, will fade away once we’ve completely eliminated our enemies and achieved a mythical state of perfection.

The decades haven’t made Bloom’s argument any easier to follow. The same terms that dominated the conversation about his landmark book—ethnocentrism on the one hand, relativism on the other—dominate still. The same thinkers and disciplines that infuriated Bloom—Heidegger, deconstruction—still occupy the minds and the curricula of graduate students in the humanities. Roughly speaking, we still understand our moral and political choice as being between open-minded liberalism—which we understand to hold that all creeds were created equal, all cultures similarly rich and bountiful in meaning, and all people at once irreplaceably unique and, under democracy’s bright sun, equal and interchangeable—and conservatism—which we understand to hold that we Westerners are inherently more advanced, our culture more sophisticated and storied, and our way of life unquestionably true.

To Bloom, such a dichotomy was not only false but oppressive. Publicly, he was entertained by critical proclamations that berated him, like the memorable one, by David Rieff, that Closing was a morally corrupt book that “decent people would be ashamed of having written.” But listening to Bloom that night in Cambridge, and reading his book closely, you couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of profound sadness. The discussion, he lamented, had become about whether we should discard the classics for having been written by dead, white men, or preserve them as the pillars of a particular culture we revere. To Bloom, there was a third way, and it was much more attentive and instinctive: The great books matter simply because they matter, and we continue to seek them out not in order to reaffirm or reevaluate our own standing in the world—a myopic view based on understanding the progress of mankind as an ongoing power struggle—but because they remain instrumental.

Again, I’m intrigued to see how much his actual writings may contrast with the conventional opinion of them. If I do find them useful and engaging, it will be an embarrassing but valuable reminder that we should never let anyone else do our thinking for us.

Robert Hughes’s death earlier this month prompted me to revisit his book Culture of Complaint, recommended to me by my friend Arthur as a criticism of political correctness/obsessiveness from a non-right-wing perspective. Among many good parts, this stood out to me:

These backward habits of judging writers in terms of their presumed ability to improve social consciousness may be tough luck for snobbish Proust and depressive Leopardi, for Henry James the closet case and Montaigne the son of bourgeois privilege. But they are even tougher for the students, who come away with the impression that the correct response to a text is to run a crude political propriety-meter over it and then let fly with a wad of stereotyped moralizing. “Boy, Professor Peach really did a job of unmasking the hierarchical assumptions in Dante last week, all those circles and stuff, you shoulda been there.”

Politics ought not be all-pervasive. Indeed, one of the first conditions of freedom is to discover the line beyond which politics may not go, and literature is one of the means by which the young (and the old) find this out. Some works of art have an overt political content; many carry subliminal political messages, embedded in their framework. But it is remarkably naive to suppose that these messages exhaust the content of the art as art, or ultimately determine its value. Why, then, the fashion for judging art in political terms? Probably, people teach it because it is easy to teach. It revives the illusion that works of art carry social meaning the way trucks carry coal. It divides the sprawling republic of literature neatly into goodies and baddies, and relives the student of the burden of imaginative empathy, the difficulties of aesthetic discrimination. It enables these scholars, with their tin ears, schematized minds and tapioca prose, to henpeck dead writers for their lack of conformity to the current fashions in “oppression studies”—and to fool themselves and their equally nostalgic colleagues into thinking that they are all on the barricades.

For many (citizens of modern-day Russia or China), being able to vote is not as valuable as being able to receive education or medical care without having to bribe a dozen greedy officials. Furthermore, citizens of authoritarian states do not necessarily perceive their undemocratically installed governments to be illegitimate, for legitimacy can be derived from things other than elections; jingoist nationalism (China), fear of a foreign invasion (Iran), fast rates of economic development (Russia), low corruption (Belarus), and efficiency of government services (Singapore) have all been successfully co-opted for these purposes.

It’s especially amusing in an election year — Americans of all political persuasions are constantly complaining that our political system is irredeemably broken in some way or another, yet it’s still widely accepted that it should be exported to everyone else, through persuasion or force.

The intriguing thing about our repeated moral letdowns is not that insincerity continues to exist, but that we continue to insist we are outraged by it. In many ways our frustration with insincerity is itself disingenuous—a kind of performance of an upright moral sensibility. Most of us actually do recognize how things get done in the world, for better or worse. Power and money matter. Who you know matters. Public and private do not need to align in political matters. This is called pragmatism, or realism, or realpolitik, or Machiavellianism, or, since Machiavelli, simply politics. WikiLeaks and the Occupy movement may have been arguing against the ways of the world for high-minded moral reasons, but as the intellectual historian Martin Jay recently wrote in his Virtues of Mendacity, the political hypocrisy Americans so passionately decry “may be the best alternative to the violence justified by those who claim to know the truth.” Many a Communist dictator, Jay notes, regularly enforced the citizenry’s total transparency by spying on and slaughtering or banishing dissenters to Siberia. Like it or not, liberty includes the right to lie; freedom allows for deceit.

Earlier this week, a few people on Twitter were freaking about the fact that freshmen entering college this year were born after Kurt Cobain killed himself. And….? Is it supposed to remind us that time has passed and continues to pass? Is it supposed to make anyone who remembers Nirvana’s music feel old?

If I were going into college this year, my thought would be “Who the hell cares?”<

I’ve never embraced the term Generation X (even though I enjoyed the novel by the same name and have read most Douglas Coupland books). But I do have many of the symptoms of Gen X: a decades long crush on Winona Ryder, memories of an Atari 2600 addiction, watching Raiders and Empire in a theater, listening to more grunge music than I care to admit, watching Challenger blow up while teachers cried at school. You’ve got a cultural touchstone? I remember that too! We share that! Yay!

I’ve never found it useful to conceptualize people as an age bracket + significant cultural events. The supposed defining factors of my generation either didn’t apply to me (I wasn’t a latchkey kid, my parents weren’t divorced) or didn’t move me profoundly. As far as I could tell from the media narrative, my peers and I were supposed to be bitterly moping over the fact that our parents failed at creating some hippie paradise while finding solace from sociopolitical doom and gloom in the surrealist, nonsensical lyrics of Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots. Maybe some people who fit that caricature actually existed, but I never met any of them. At any rate, I’m not at all interested in what I have in common with large groups of people. I’d much rather look for points of departure.

If we do this, we might notice that there seem to be only four possible ways to explain (i.e., conceptualize) our objects of consciousness (i.e., our experience). This is so whether our objects are exotic ones, such as photons, or pure mental objects such as the idea of simplicity, or common physical objects such as cups. These four ways form the four horns of Nagarjuna’s tetralemma, which can be simply stated as follows: either (1) objects are themselves, or (2) they are not themselves, or (3) they are both themselves and not themselves, or (4) they are neither themselves nor are they not themselves.

It would seem to common sense that at least the first statement ought to hold true, and thus offer some explanation of experience. But, as we shall see, none of the four options does. None does—yet experience remains.

The exposition of that argument is too long to excerpt, but you can read it here, if you’ve been feeling an urge to pull the epistemological rug out from under your own feet.

It was fundamental to Wittgenstein’s thinking – both in his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and in his later work Philosophical Investigations – that not everything we can see and therefore not everything we can mentally grasp can be put into words. In the Tractatus, this appears as the distinction between what can be said and what has to be shown. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” runs the famed last sentence of the book but, as Wittgenstein made clear in private conversation and correspondence, he believed those things about which we have to be silent to be the most important. (Compare this with the logical positivist Otto Neurath, who, echoing Wittgenstein, declared: “We must indeed be silent – but not about anything.”)

To grasp these important things, we need not to reason verbally, but rather to look more attentively at what lies before us. “Don’t think, look!” Wittgenstein urges in Philosophical Investigations. Philosophical confusion, he maintained, had its roots not in the relatively superficial thinking expressed by words but in that deeper territory studied by Freud, the pictorial thinking that lies in our unconscious and is expressed only involuntarily in, for example, our dreams, our doodles and in our “Freudian slips”. “A picture held us captive,” Wittgenstein says in the Investigations, and it is, he thinks, his job as a philosopher not to argue for or against the ￼￼truth of this or that proposition but rather to delve deeper and substitute one picture for another. In other words, he conceived it as his task to make us, or at least to enable us, to see things differently.

This is actually a frustration I feel keenly, constantly; the difficulty of capturing mental pictures in words. Like Susan Sontag said, some conceptual furniture and pictures won’t fit through the small doorway of writing. I’m annoyed with the limitations of almost everything I write as soon as I declare it finished (or, rather, when I finally tire of wrestling with it and just release it as is). I see detailed masterpieces in my head, but I feel like I might as well be using a basic box of eight-color Crayolas to actualize them.

Reading Pharyngula has definitely plummeted into diminishing returns territory, but what the hell, we’re here for the moment, let’s do this:

Im in that awkward position where i do agree with most of the values and dislike the misogynist idiots but see no value or reason to mix atheism and the other values. For me atheism just is the simple disbelief and my political values stand apart from it.

Now you see, that’s just stupid. There are lots of atheists who take this blinkered stance that atheism is just one specific idea about rejecting god-belief, and it has absolutely no philosophical foundation and should have no political or social consequences. And that’s nonsense. This commenter is deluding himself as thoroughly as any god-walloper.

If there is no god, if religion is a sham, that has significant consequences for how we should structure our society. You could argue over how we should shape our culture — a libertarian atheist would lean much more towards a Darwinian view, for instance, than I would — but to pretend that atheism is just an abstraction floating in the academic ether is silly.

No, you jackass, you idiot, you fatuous blowhard, the point he was making was that political values are not derived from one’s stance on the truth or falsity of monotheism. They can be justified or rejected without appeal to religion or the lack thereof. As evidenced by, oh, I don’t know, the fact that a strict atheist like Ayn Rand could share common political cause with the party of Christian fundamentalism. Or the fact that many lay members of various denominations would be willing to work with you on all your social justice goals, regardless of how suspiciously you eye each other’s ultimate motivation. Or the fact that your old pal Hitchens managed to carry his Trotskyist beliefs across the political spectrum into alliances with widely varied political bedfellows, all while remaining an atheist. The fact of a godless world has inspired everyone from fascists to communists, which makes it pretty much useless as an organizing principle for your intents and purposes.

Because I’m an atheist and share common cause with every other human being on the planet in desiring to live my one life with equal opportunity, I suggest that atheists ought to fight for equality for all, economic security for all, and universally available health and education services. Peace is the only answer; extinguishing a precious human life ought to be unthinkable in all but the most dire situations of self-defense. Ours should be a movement that welcomes all sexes, races, ages, and abilities and encourages an appreciation of human richness. Atheism ought to be a progressive social movement in addition to being a philosophical and scientific position, because living in a godless universe means something to humanity.

If you agree with that, you’re an atheist+. Or a secular humanist. Whatever. You’re someone who cares about the world outside the comforting glow of your computer screen. It really isn’t a movement about exclusion, but about recognizing the impact of the real nature of the universe on human affairs.

And if you don’t agree with any of that — and this is the only ‘divisive’ part — then you’re an asshole. I suggest you form your own label, “Asshole Atheists” and own it, proudly. I promise not to resent it or cry about joining it.

Actually, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with any of those insipid platitudes propositions. It’s about finding them incoherent and hopelessly utopian, ignorant of both history and basic human psychology. Do you honestly think religiously-inspired unreasonableness is the only thing preventing such a world from coming into existence? Better minds than yours have tried and failed to reorganize the world according to ideals of perfect justice and rationality, yet you apparently think tiresome adolescent bravado will carry you the rest of the way there. The sort of equality you envision only exists as a mathematical abstraction, not as the end result of policymaking. Practically speaking, you sound like you’re trying to form a Green party minus the pantheism or mystical nature-worship. Philosophically speaking, for all of your blather about the immense significance of a godless universe to humanity, you don’t seem to have strayed far from the familiar path blazed by the most extreme Christian idealism.

The official Twitter account for the Russian punk band Pussy Riot announced that two of their members have left Russia to avoid further persecution from Russian authorities.

Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Maria Alyokhina, 24, were sentenced to two years in jail for their role in the “Punk Prayer” video that sparked the whole controversy. Despite receiving worldwide criticism for persecuting the band members, Russian police announced earlier this week that they were pursuing more band members on more criminal charges.

Goodness! You mean all those heartfelt posts and tweets from longtime fans (some of them having followed the band for as long as a month!) amounted to nothing but ineffectual posturing? Sacrificing limbs for the cause was all for naught? Must be due to that mysterious Russian soul:

Which brings me to the part of the Pussy Riot story that the Western won’t touch: A huge number of Russians, many of them decent Russians, many of them the type we consider “our” Russians — want to get medieval on the Pussy Riot girls, string them up in Red Square, and make it hurt. Like I said, this anger comes not just from the reactionary peasant caricatures or KGB Putin goons or crusty Commies — but from “our” Russians too, educated yuppie-Russians, indie-rock/hipster Russians, student Russians, anti-Putin Russians …

Hell, even a sizable portion of the hundreds of thousands who protested Putin earlier this year would be found in a lynch mob against the Pussy Riot girls. You thought what those Russians were protesting was the chance to become just like freedom-loving Nebraskans? (Wait, are there freedom-loving Nebraskans?) If you got that impression from the anti-Putin protests, you don’t know Russians very well.

…Part of the hostility to Pussy Riot is that they’ve become a cause-célèbre in the West. Russians have not had a very good historical experience with things the West think Russia should do, going back a few centuries — the memory of America’s support for that drunken buffoon Yeltsin while he let the country and its people sink into misery is still raw — “a painful memory” like John Turturro’s character says in “Miller’s Crossing,” a memory woven tightly into the Russian RNA’s spool of historical grievances. And nothing triggers that reactionary Russian live-wire gene like an earful of Westerners moralizing about any topic, even the most obvious topic, even the topic where it’s 100% clear we’re on the right side for once.

So when they hear us finally paying attention again to Russia because a punk band with an English name using Latin script falls under the Kremlin’s gun, they don’t necessarily see “injustice” the way we do from our far-away vantage point — they see another dastardly plot by the West to humiliate Mother Russia and bring her to her knees.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.